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Sifting the Wheat From the Chaff

Reinhold Niebuhr thought democracy worked only by recognizing the world can’t be perfected—by recognizing original sin.

By

Barton Swaim

June 26, 2015 3:12 p.m. ET

It’s no great compliment to liberal Protestantism that its two greatest figures—Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr—still command both popular and scholarly attention not because they expressed liberal Protestant belief so brilliantly but because in critical respects they departed from it. Barth rejected the German theological establishment’s “demythification” of the Christian Gospel and Scriptures. Niebuhr, whose interests lay in Christianity’s social and political ideas rather than in its theological doctrines, rejected liberal Protestantism’s rosy view of man and willfully blind optimism about human progress.